SwiNOG #42, held on October 20–21, 2026, at the Enter Technikwelt near Solothurn, was a special edition for us. For the first time in SwiNOG history, we stepped away from our traditional one-day format and organised a full two-day meeting — with technical presentations, plenty of opportunities to exchange ideas, and a social event in a venue that could hardly have been more fitting for a room full of network geeks.
With 74 participants, 17 talks and 6 sponsors, this edition was smaller than our usual meetings in Bern. But SwiNOG has never been about breaking attendance records. It is about bringing together people who build, operate and improve networks, sharing knowledge and learning from each other.
And #42 certainly delivered on that.
Two days of technical depth
The agenda covered an impressive range of topics, from BGP security, RPKI, ASPA and RFC 9234 to network automation, Kubernetes operators, AI-assisted operations, telemetry and cyber resilience.
AI was once again a recurring topic, but with a welcome focus on practical applications rather than hype. We explored on-premises LLM clusters for network and security analysis, the challenges of moving agentic NetOps from lab environments into production, and the increasingly important role of networking in AI infrastructure.
Routing and network operations remained at the heart of SwiNOG. Discussions around BGP security extensions, FRRouting, small BNG architectures and real-world automation challenges provided exactly the kind of technical exchange our community is known for.
We also looked beyond purely technical challenges, including the legal situation around internet domain blocking in Switzerland and the ongoing revision of the Telecommunications Act.
And, of course, there was room for some nostalgia. Surrounded by decades of computing history at Enter Technikwelt, the talks on retro networking and the museum itself reminded us just how far technology has come – and how much of that history still influences the networks we operate today.
No buzzword bingo, no unnecessary marketing, just engineers sharing what works, what doesn’t, and what they have learned along the way.
More than just talks
One of the reasons we decided to try a two-day format was to create more room for something that has always been an essential part of SwiNOG: the conversations between presentations.
The first evening’s social event gave participants the opportunity to continue discussions, reconnect with familiar faces and meet new people in a more relaxed setting.
Enter Technikwelt was a particularly fitting location for this experiment. Where else can you discuss modern network automation and AI while surrounded by historic computers and technology from another era?
It was something different from our usual meetings on the Gurten, and that was very much the point.
Whether the two-day format will become a regular part of SwiNOG remains to be seen. As always, we will listen to the community and learn from the experience.
Talks
Across two days, we covered a broad selection of technical topics:
- Reality, Rewritten: AI as Forger and Investigator – Dominik Haenni
- Automating Target Discovery in the gNMIc Operator – Daniel Schatzmann
- On-prem LLM cluster for network and security analyses – Mischa Diehm
- Networking for AI – Remi Locherer
- Internet Domain Blocking: Current Legal Situation and Outlook on the Current Revision of the Telecommunications Act – Simon Schlauri
- From Connectivity to Cyber Resilience: Defense in Depth for the Connected Enterprise – Yannick Gautier
- Managing IP Allocation with an Open-Source DDI – Marco Martinez
- Beyond RPKI Origin Validation: RFC 9234 (BGP Roles) and ASPA – Claudio Jeker
- From Lab to Production: The Hard Parts of Agentic NetOps – Tobias Bühler
- The Cloud-Native Advantage: Intent-based Network Automation – Alexander North
- The Accidental Platform Team: Kubernetes Operators at Swisscom – Fabian Schulz
- FRRouting Open Discussion – Martin Winter
- Small BNGs – Fiona Weber
- Retro Networks – Gianpaolo Del Matto
- CommunityRack – New Focus, New Projects, More Bits! – Andrew Vieyra
- Rheintal IX Update – Thomas Fritz
- SwissIX Update – Arist Volger
A big thank you to all our speakers for sharing their experience, ideas and technical insights with the community.
Resources are online
The presentation materials are available on the SwiNOG #42 meeting page, with recordings being added where available:
👉 https://www.swinog.ch/meetings/swinog42/
As always, we want the knowledge shared at SwiNOG to remain accessible beyond the event itself.
Thank you!
Organising a two-day meeting at a new location was a new challenge for our volunteer-driven team. There were plenty of things to coordinate, a few lessons learned and, as with any good technical project, some things we will certainly do differently next time.
A big thank you to Enter Technikwelt for hosting us in such a unique environment.
We would also like to thank our sponsors and supporters SwissIX, AWS, Emitec, Flexoptix, Nokia and NIX.CZ for making this meeting possible.
And most importantly, thank you to everyone who attended, presented, contributed to discussions or simply came along to be part of the SwiNOG community.
SwiNOG has been bringing network operators together since 2000. The technologies, challenges and even the meeting formats may change, but the idea behind it remains the same.
We meet, we share, we go back to work.
Looking ahead
Our next meeting, SwiNOG #43, is already planned for April 15, 2027, when we will return to our familiar venue on Bern’s Gurten.
We look forward to seeing you there!
-steven
SwiNOG Core Team